TESTING FAMILIAL AGGREGATION

Likelihood calculation for pedigrees is complicated and often time-con suming. Testing correlation structures due to familial aggregation is therefore a preliminary procedure. A score statistic is given to check correlations between relatives of randomly chosen pedigrees. This sta tistic can be used for quantitative and dichotomous data. For both dat a types, the distribution of the statistic under the null hypothesis i s derived. To demonstrate the performance of the statistic, results of simulations under various models are given. Finally, the test is appl ied to data on a continuous blood factor.